No to Brussels, Yes to Kiev: New president sets course for more independent Poland

Youthful energy and rhetoric for change have seen Andrzej Duda transformed from a virtual unknown to the rising star of Eastern European politics – but his presidency could set Poland against Russia and the EU.

On Sunday, 51.6 percent of the electorate cast their votes for
Duda to replace the centrist incumbent Bronislaw Komorowski, with
a turnout of 55.4 percent, according to the official results.
Exit polls showed that over 60 percent of rural voters supported
Duda, but only about 40 percent of those live in cities.

Like the last president from the Law and Justice party and Duda’s
idol, the late Lech Kaczynski, who held the office from 2005 to
2010, the new Polish leader won by appealing to voters from the
traditional heartlands – Catholics, social conservatives,
farmers, and those left behind by Poland’s superficially stellar
economic performance in the last decade.

His promises have been wildly populist: Duda said he would lower
the retirement age, which rose to 67 in 2012, raise income tax
brackets, and force banks to turn lucrative Swiss franc mortgages
into manageable Polish zloty ones, costing them billions of
dollars in profit.

Duda’s critics have dismissed his proposals as contradictory,
unfeasible, and even illegal. Indeed, as president he does not
have the power to ride roughshod over prime minister Ewa Kopaczand parliament, which is dominated
by her centrist Civic Platform party, at least until autumn’s
parliamentary election. His actual responsibilities for now will
be mainly vetoing unacceptable legislation, and representing
Poland at international meetings.

However, it wasn’t only Duda’s wild promises that enabled him to
defeat Komorowski, a popular politician with credentials as an
anti-communist underground printer, but also the personality and
spirit he brought to the campaign.

Firstly, as the son of two academics, married to the daughter of
a famous writer, and a former professor at Poland’s most
prestigious Jagiellonian University himself, the suave,
intellectual Duda does not have the same rough edges as the
Kaczynskis, who could always be caricatured, however unfairly, as
country bumpkins. As a 43-year-old, whose previous political
experience consisted of a short stint in government almost ten
years ago and a year in the European parliament, Duda, who has no
Communist-era baggage, has credibility as an ‘outsider’ and
successfully presented himself as a candidate for change, a word
he used liberally in his campaign.

While he would have probably captured the rural voters by
default, it was grabbing nearly two-thirds of the under-30 vote
that allowed Duda to surge over the line in a tight race,
according to exit polls

In contrast, Komorowski, considered a shoo-in even after the
first round of voting, canvassed complacently, while often
sounding out-of-touch, entitled, and irascible. Meanwhile, his
party, Civic Platform, which had been in power since 2007, is
also evidently beginning to engender some voter fatigue
regardless of its successes, such as hefty 3.5 percent economic
growth rate this year, compared to rest of Europe which continues
to trundle along.

Pragmatist or radical?

With the constraints of his role, and uncertainty about the
rigidity of his ideology, it is not yet clear what, if any,
impact Duda will have during his five-year term.

Wary of being painted as an ideologue, and unwilling to
resuscitate the divisive rhetoric of Law and Justice’s last
government in 2005-7, Duda presented himself as a one-nation
moderate during his stump speeches. “Each of us is a bit
rational and a bit radical, but we need to look for shared
values,” went a typical soundbite.

However, beneath the image of a ‘reasonable man,’ lies a set of
spiky beliefs.

Civic Platform has treated touchy EU issues, such as migration,
trade or industrial decline, as an inevitable and reasonable
price to pay for a historic chance to join Europe’s leading bloc,
but Duda and his party appear more ambivalent.

Warsaw is obliged to eventually join the euro under its terms of
accession, and while the current government has merely moved the
date back, Duda has actively attacked the troubled currency, as
well as other EU policies.

“We shouldn’t agree with decarbonization which is devastating
to Polish energy industry or to hurry with joining eurozone as it
will lead to drastic prices increases,” he said during his
campaign, in which he also produced a video about a family
struggling to buy food in a future eurozone Poland.

Although Duda is unlikely likely to revert to the disruptive
anti-Berlin rants of the Kaczynskis, Poland’s relationship with
Angela Merkel, carefully rebuilt by Civic Platform, could be
tested.

“If they win power, Law and Justice will build alliances with
Lithuania and Ukraine, and neglect Germany and France,”
Radoslaw Markowski, head of the comparative politics department
at the Institute of Political Studies at the Polish Academy of
Sciences, told the New York Times. “They have a deeply rooted
Euroskepticism.”

Duda could also antagonize the rest of Europe with hardline
nationalist sentiments: in a recent TV debate he said those who
acknowledged the role of Poles in the 1941 anti-Jewish Jedwabne
pogrom were “smearing the country’s good name.”

On Ukraine, the dominant international issue for Poland in the
past year, Duda and Komorowski have been outdoing each other in
showing their loyalty to Kiev. The president elect has called not
only for EU membership for Ukraine, but also military assistance
in fighting the rebel republics in the east of the country.

Despite Moscow’s attempts to forge informal alliances with
Euroskeptic politicians of all persuasions in recent years, the
Kremlin is likely to take a dim view of a Polish leader
ratcheting up the tension in what is already a mistrustful
relationship.

Yet, with most aspects of Duda’s future administration, and even
his public persona, for the present there can only be conjecture.
The decisive factor is likely to be the election for the Sejm,
Poland’s lower house of parliament, which will either give of
Duda a free hand to pursue his agenda with the help of Law and
Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski, or leave the new president
moored in a more symbolic and contained role, following a renewed
Civic Platform mandate.